This isn’t for your music—this is just for daily communication. Just think of how awesome it will be for video bloggers to be able NOT wear headphones and look like doofuses on Skype. This seems like a massive, untapped market for http://www.holosonics.com.

Bring back payphones with this technology and you’ll never have to touch an unsanitized handset ever again or worry about a missing handset.

I mean, really, kiosk “areas” for advertising your bananas in supermarkets is a really, asinine application of this technology. The only place I’ve ever seen this in the appropriate wild was a public library in Ogden, UT at a public-information station. But add a microphone to the mix and you’ve gotten away from mere pico-broadcasting and made something better.

esXML I figured that I'd quickly delurk and drop a note here about a friend's presentation about esXML, or Efficiency Structured XML. It looks like the start of an extremely useful standard addressing many of the weaknesses of XML.

News-ish Blog on Python and Humane User Interfaces Started a news-ish blog that will focus on Python and Humane User Interfaces in technology (not limited to just computers). Occassionally I'll post other things that seem cool. Recursism Laboratories Interactive. I just wrote up a small survey on grid computing and it made me exercise some journalisitic muscles that I haven't used since like the 7th grade.

25 April 2003: My Father Dies, Age 51; Heart Attack However, I did not learn of this until the following Monday. This week has been a whirlwind of ups and downs, with many downs. Lots and lots of things are up in the air. He had no will that I can find, in fact, his files were fairly random so it took a few hours of creating files from his piles to determine this. I realize that financially he could not have done everything he may have wanted at the time and very likely was trying to do this eventually, but probably never expected to die so young. He had no prior history of heart problems.

For you Advogatians who are older, find an estate lawyer and financial planner to help you protect your assets-- because whatever you leave behind without instructions (aka will) will be administered by the State in ways you may not have liked. It isn't expensive to do this, and your family will greatly appreciate not having to grieve and juggle your finances at roughly the same time.

For you Advogatians who are younger, I realize that its somewhat morbid to ask your parents or grandparents about these things and might be uncomfortable doing so but you and your family should consider doing this at least every year because things change-- people die, friendships fade, relations change. And yes, you too also need to find a financial planner to help you protect and grow your assets into the future and as a benefit, doing is sooner rather than later will help you enjoy a better "retirement."

My worst day was last Tuesday, but I still think about him and I have four new reminders of him living in my house now, Mikey, Binkey, Fluffy and Precious; three tuxedo cats and a calico-tabby all with four distinct personalities. The arrangement is temporary as I think they'll eventually move back in with my mother. Otherwise, it has been non-stop phone calls and other reminders about him that have been pretty hard.

Working from Home Again So very very happy to not have to drive to McLean, VA 5x/week. Of course that means that I'm not going to be working as much for that job, but then again, I was getting absolutely sick of the work.

Pondering Subversion The ebuild in Gentoo requires neon 0.19.2 but Gentoo provides neon 0.21.3. I don't know how much time I'll spend hammering on it and give up and go with CVS, again. For those who haven't heard much about Subversion, there is a draft book at http://svnbook.red-bean.com/book.pdf.
[...] Bummer, the ebuild fails. I've spent enough time on it for today.

pydbbench Putzed a bit last night getting pydbbench to generate GNU Plots of the execution data. It made pretty pictures but didn't really progress the framework of getting a Python script to automatically run and summarize benchmarks. Tonight I had a small fight with DB 2.0 API until I figured out that the pyPgSQL has a more advanced "connect_string" feature (send a string or a dict of parameters) than the MySQLdb library has (only a string is allowed.)

The only test written is a connect-disconnect test and the harness makes runs roughly:

each benchmark to run 120 seconds
for each driver: (PostgreSQL, MySQL)
for each benchmark: (dbconnectdisconnect)
run the setup
for each concurrency: (1,25,100,250,500)
run that benchmark
summarize that benchmark
run the teardown

When it starts hammering 500 sessions I think either the 2.4.20 Linux scheduler or Python threading starts to choke.
I don't have enough hardware to run the benchmarker against a different machine where I would expect some different numbers. Now I'm getting to a point where it's time to write some more interesting tests. The framework also tracks successful iterations which I just tested by setting the max-connections for MySQL down fairly low. I'm going to stop hacking on it tonight and go back and do some reading.

Gentoo Linux Switching To RPM Format Fuck, shit, cunt, sonovabitch, damn... what a fucking great April Fool's headline. Now I'm going to be shell-shocked for everything else that'll happen tomorrow.

BT & Redhat 9 I'm not seeing as large a speedup for this download as I saw for Mandrake, could be a function of the mix of users attempting to download RH9.

Work Again, I'm taking on risk to be happy.

For the Advogato Commons: Draft/Code in Progress Working on a small database benchmarking harness for the purposes of comparing recent versions of MySQL and PostgreSQL. People too often say that "This or the other is better/faster" but it is still quite useful to be able to run some kind of benchmark to get some numbers. Many other database benchmarks out there have good concerns with "end-to-end" testing (browser-webserver-app-db as in TPC-W) but end-to-end testing takes too long to set up and administer and I think that there are some legal issues with "publishing" TPC-W numbers.

The Open Source Database Benchmark seems to be dead, it was written in C which I don't think is absolutely needed to get a general idea of how a database will operate. MySQL's sql-bench is written in perl but doesn't work with newer versions of PostgreSQL. I'm not sure that I want to use a benchmark written by a database vendor themselves when they may have intimate knowledge of the inner workings of their own system-- but also sql-bench does not seem to have a "concurrent" method of testing where multiple sessions are hammering on the database simultaneously.

I really do love Python, so I'm going to go at it with Python. Perhaps the work will create some more pressure to help bring Python's database support to the levels of Perl DBI.

What? No, this isn't an April Fools thing.

The Straw that is ATA/IDE Waiting on an updatedb to complete so I can use the locate command without a warning. This is driving me nuts-- I wish there were a way to make these drives faster.

pydbbench I hope I didn't accidentally use someone elses name, I didn't do a search. I haven't finished the code to summarize the total "measurement" for all sessions, but each session knows how to count the number of iterations, rate of execution, and min,max,avg times of execution. This is connect/disconnect for PostgreSQL 7.3.2. Eventually I'll figure out how to chuck this into SVG for more oohs-and-aahs. I'm pretty happy with Python's treading so far.

Mandrake 9.1 and BitTorrent I'm running a download not because I care much about Mandrake but I care more about BitTorrent, and want to see BT "succeed" as an alternative to other P2P systems. BT follows a little bit more the UNIX philosophy of building "small tools to achieve one purpose" than any other P2P application out there, which seem to kitchen-sink IRC, P2P, and Media player altogether.

Unfortunately the GUI version of BT segfaults on Gentoo (it was a masked ebuild so I'm not dissappointed) but the headless downloader still works:

I started this download from my W2K Laptop, let it run all night and it choked down about 49% of the ISO's. This morning I moved it to my Linux machine and was happy to see that the interim formats were platform independent, and resumed at my faster T1 connection at work.

The only annoying part is the slow startup of BT when resuming, because it needs to scan the entire download to know how much is downloaded.